


On And On The Rain Will Fall

by CalamityCain



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Trailer, Crying, Everything Hurts, Grief/Mourning, Kissing, M/M, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-21
Updated: 2017-12-21
Packaged: 2019-02-17 22:09:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13086378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CalamityCain/pseuds/CalamityCain
Summary: “Sleep now, brother. I’ll never betray you again.”Set somewhere vaguely within the events of Infinity War, on which we can only speculate(Dec 2015)





	On And On The Rain Will Fall

**Author's Note:**

> I do not know why I write these things. There is no reason for you to read them unless you like pain.

 

 

He had gone into battle laughing. Proud to the last, with fire in his fearsome smile and lightning in his lone eye. In the gentle light of the dying sun, one could see a flicker of that smile still.

 

The weight of him was crushing; but no more so than when he would turn over in bed and crush his smaller sibling, provoking the retribution of teeth and blades. For the first time Loki bore it without complaint. He stroked the golden hair that had just begun to grow out from where it had been shorn, restored to a hint of its former glory. Not enough to crown a king – but enough to crown a lover.

 

_You’re safe from my knives now. Nothing can hurt you._

 

Pressing his face close to catch the last of the familiar warmth before it fled forever, he cursed his brother’s foolishness as his nails dug into the leather and steel that was now so much useless armour. Felt ice and venom crackle on his lips, his fingertips. _I curse you, Thor. For leaving me bereft I curse you._

 

Then the hardness faded from his white narrow face. He laid a kiss on the cooling brow.

 

“Sleep easy now, brother. I’ll never betray you again.”

 

 

*****

 

 

They found him curled beside the fallen King of Asgard, the two of them entwined like peacefully slumbering lovers. It was only when they tried to separate the living from the dead that they found the task nearly impossible. Loki’s limbs were as the frosted branches of a winter-blackened tree – rigid to the point of snapping. He appeared almost catatonic, clinging harder to Thor than death itself.

 

“There is nothing more you can do for him.”

 

_I can stay by his side so he need not fear the dark._

 

“Let him go, Loki. Let them ready him for the last rites you know he deserves.”

 

Heimdall alone heard the low keening from his half-parted lips that had the cadence of a child’s plaintive lament.

 

_He has always needed me. More than he admits._

 

No other would he let near him; only the Watcher who had been guardian to them both when they were little more than babes. None else would hear the broken mewl that ill fitted his famed silver tongue. They saw only his eerily mask-like face and eyes that were neither open nor shut, and seemed to gaze straight into the afterworld.

 

If he was in pursuit of his brother, they said, he searched the wrong realm. Thor Odinson would join the brave and mighty at the eternal feast in Valhalla. Thor the storm-bringer who had carried the pride of the people of Asgard, who carried it still by the very name he would leave behind when his body became ash, and the legacy each new-born child would learn when they learnt his name.

 

None of this mattered to the remaining prince. The would-be king.

 

_I never wanted the throne._

 

“Never.”

 

Heimdall was calm in his relentlessness. “None expect you to. But they expect you to take it nonetheless.”

 

Loki did not meet the Watcher’s eternal gaze in which danced the stars of countless skies and the dark of deep space. He had emerged from his half-somnambulistic state to find his arms empty and his heart and lungs emptier still. Preparations must be made. The send-off – a fully magnificent, stately affair as befitted a king and a hero – was to take place tomorrow night. He knew he would not be ready. He knew it did not matter.

 

Then again, what did? What was Loki without Thor? Just as well to have a moon without the sun; to have a sun with no world to shine upon.

 

“I have spent half my life pushing him away, knowing he will return twice as hard as I push,” he whispered to no one, not caring if Heimdall heard. Heimdall, who had watched over them when they were ignorant little brats no more fit to be royal heirs than swine were fit to wear crowns. Who must, with his all-seeing eyes, have borne witness to Thor’s final act that preceded his magnificent death.

 

 

 

_A kiss._ The very last to burn itself into its receiver’s memory for all time.

 

He had known unerringly what Thor was going to do a second before those blue eyes lit with the blaze that said: _Valhalla, I am coming._ It was something inescapable, such intimacy with the workings of each other’s thoughts from a bond forged over millennia.

 

But he had not foreseen the kiss. When it came, it swept him up like a storm. A hand large enough to encircle half his waist pulling him close with such force he had not the presence of mind to resist. His mouth welcoming his brother’s even as he raged against the farewell he wanted no part of. Loathing how he clung so tightly in his rage and his hunger that has never, ever been fully sated, and never will be.

 

_“No,”_ was his last word before those lips met his.

 

_“I love you,”_ were Thor’s.

 

In those handful of seconds he felt every kiss and sigh and fight and fuck they had ever shared relived in the heat between their mouths. Memories enveloping them both with such immediacy as to allow them, for that most precious of moments, to exist in a realm severed from reality. To be the way they were forever. To live in a series of forevers. Pushing and pulling, interdependent to their last breath, never truly apart.

 

A parting gift, then, before Thor’s most cruel blow.

 

Ah, but had he not done the same to his beloved, and more than once? Now he must know just how deeply it cuts.

 

 

_“Stay safe,” he said over the edge of his book as Thor cloaked himself for travel._

_“In battle? You ask the impossible of me as usual.”_

_“Die, then.”_

_Thor’s smile grew all the wider._

 

 

When he knelt by Thor’s side, he was smiling. It was a smile as radiant and unwavering as any he had ever bestowed. Let this, and not the weeping of sorrow, be the last thing his brother laid eyes on in the world of the living.

 

That was _his_ parting gift. For once, it was better than Thor’s.

 

He continued to smile when the electric-blue eye dulled and ceased to see him. Continued even when the corners of his lips felt like they must crack and splinter. Then slowly, meticulously, he straightened the rumpled clothing, refastened the broken vambraces, arranged Thor’s hair and wiped the blood from his face. All this he did while humming an ancient melody taught to them at their mother’s knee.

 

Then the smile left his face, and all that was left was shadow on his pale visage. He began to tremble. Or perhaps it was the earth beneath him that trembled. It ceased only when he drew Thor’s head and shoulders against his chest and held them close and promised to stay by his side till the end.

 

 

*****

 

 

He would keep his promise. After a lifetime of lies, it was the least he could do.

 

There was some small thanks to be had for meeting one’s end on solid land, as opposed to the great emptiness of space where an Asgard cast adrift had survived admirably, if not thrived. Being moored on Earth had allowed them to seek out a fitting place for his brother’s last rites. A place where the grass swayed gently beneath a soft sea breeze, and the night sky was clear and star-flecked.

 

Loki found a meditative comfort in polishing his helm and every reflective inch of his ceremonial armour till he could see his fearfully calm face staring back at him. He resisted all help in getting dressed, immersing himself in the cumbersome process as if deriving some kind of satisfaction from it. The deep green cloak he had not worn in ages, he ironed and smoothed by hand. Menial tasks where magic or servant would usually be employed. But he was not, after all, in a hurry. He told himself that he was not delaying the night and what must come with it. All the magic he possessed could not hold back the dark.

 

 

_“He loves you more dearly than any of us.”_

_“I do not doubt your word. Then again, he was always a fool.”_

_“Do you not love_ him? _”_

_“That cocky, artless brute? What makes you think so?”_

_“The way you look at him with such venom. But also, like you would wither and die if he did not notice you.”_

_“Shut up, Fandral.”_

 

 

Loki made minute adjustments to every inch of his regal costume; smoothed out the locks of hair visible from beneath his heavy helm. Looked in the mirror and imagined blue eyes in place of the green ones that stared back at him. “I have failed you for the last time,” he said. “Take comfort in that.”

 

 

*****

 

 

But he did not fail to be the most dutiful, dignified prince the people could ask for at the funeral of their most beloved monarch. For truly, they wept for the son as they had not wept for the father. There were few who did not love Thor of the booming voice and ready smile, who was regal in court and ridiculous over a horn of mead, whose last portrait – which would have hung in the hall of great kings, had it not burned with the rest of old Asgard – was not a scowling berserker or a solemn sovereign, but a smiling man with long golden locks and lost eye restored, wearing a crown of stars.

 

Amid the mournful faces, Loki was the very embodiment of calm and grace. Perhaps this, more than his most fantastic shapeshifting feats, was his greatest performance of all. When the time came for the final farewell, he lifted the bow with its flaming arrow like a born archer. He had never so much as touched a bow in his life. But with the aid of a discreetly cast spell, the arrow flew in a flawless arc to strike the oak vessel and set it aflame.

 

His eyes followed the burning boat all the way to the water’s edge. Its bright fury winking out against the horizon was the last thing he could properly recall of the ritual. He awoke some hours later in his bed and wondered how he came to be there.

 

And now that he was awake, he knew there was no rest for him here. This was not where he wished to be in the cold comfortless hours of pre-dawn.

 

Without consciously guiding his feet, he knew where they would lead him.

 

The chamber was exactly how Thor left it. His possessions scattered in their rightful places, waiting for him to return. He was ever in the habit of casually stealing a book from Loki if he had the sudden need to look something up; look, here was one of them now, lying open on a chair where some used clothes hung.

 

Loki reached for it and suddenly his heart twisted, and so did the walls as his knees gave way. He felt dizzy from the blow of realisation that Thor would never finish reading the hastily bookmarked page – see, he had folded the corner to mark it, knowing how it incensed Loki when he did that. The bastard.

 

Trembling fingers reached for one of the shirts hanging on the chair back. There was a small rip in it. Smiling crookedly, Loki touched the spot and let his magic flow into the fabric, closing the gap and willing the threads to weave themselves back together. He flung it in Thor’s imaginary face. “There, I’ve mended it. Are you happy now?”

 

Thor did not answer. But the bed seemed to beckon, warm, inviting. Loki lowered himself to lie amid the pillows and slowly pulled one to his chest. It smelt of him. Everything did: the sheets, the quilted blanket, all bore his scent and traces of sweat still. Loki hugged the pillow tight and pressed his face into it. Here in this room, in this bed, it felt as if Thor had never left. Here he was now, pressing against Loki’s back, throwing a too-heavy arm over him. Knowing Loki would complain about how he badly needed a bath, and snorting and smothering him more on purpose.

 

And that was when the tears came.

 

Not the quiet, graceful tears he wished he could have wept at the send-off; no. These were ugly, childish, broken sobs that refused to cease, the kind of chest-heaving sobs that have a life of their own and more often than not segue into a long stream of wails. With no one to witness him (save, perhaps, the eternal Watcher who had laid eyes on much worse indignities), he wailed into the sheets as he breathed in their achingly familiar smell, spilt his shameless cries into a cold new world, a world that was the same save one little difference that had made itself known and final in the dog-eared page of an unread book.

 

_“Did you mourn, brother?”_ Careless words. Cutting words. All he had ever been good at, save for when he was safe and warm and Thor became impossible to stay angry at.

 

Bitter regrets. Unspoken envy. Broken promises and a broken bridge. Cursing, scratching, clinging; heated words of love, spoken in secret, in those moments where they were more than brothers. Losing and finding each other at the abandoned edges of a lawless planet. And at the end of it, a kiss.

 

Gradually the wailing turned back into sobs, and the sobs dropped to a whisper. He was not aware of falling into an exhausted, dreamless slumber, Thor’s blanket over his shoulders. His face was pressed against the pillow still. He clung to it tight even in sleep.

 

Outside the ship, grey slowly turned to gold on the abandoned moor where a hailed hero had departed to his rightful place among the stars.

 

Above, the sun broke through the pre-dawn gloom as a misty rain carried the scent of the sea over the vast lands. A new day, full of weeping sky, had nonetheless begun.

 

 

**~*~**

 

  

 

On and on the rain will fall

Like tears from a star;

On and on the rain will say

How fragile we are.

_\- Sting (Fragile)_

 

 


End file.
